Annensky

Not strictly a Nordic item, though it has many Finnish echoes and connections*: the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) has made available a complete downloadable scan of my 1971 doctoral dissertation on the poetry and poetics of Innokenty Annensky.

It’s interesting to see this work again after such a long time.  My writing style has changed somewhat in the interim, but I can still recognise the author as myself. The dissertation is detailed and academically disciplined – there's also some application of the structuralist principles current in literary criticism at that time – but I wasn’t afraid to let my emotions speak now and then. The introduction was written last of all, in 1970, after my return from a second study period in Moscow, and some of the gloom that surrounded politics and literature in the Soviet Union at that time can be detected in the text.

*See, for example, the Imatra page on the Мир Иннокентия Анненского website.